Minecraft decides to drop Oculus following Facebook acquisition

Yesterday, Facebook announced it was buying Oculus VR for around $2 billion. There was a bit of a backlash after the announcement was made. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson was one of the most outspoken individuals regarding the acquisition.

Persson said that he is no longer going to bring Minecraft to the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Minecraft has sold 14 million copies across multiple console platforms

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

Oculus VR raised around $2.5 million from crowdfunding platform Kickstarter prior to the acquisition. This was followed by over $90 million in funding from Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, Founders Fund, BIG Ventures, Formation 8, and Andreessen Horowitz.